Memo to law enforcement investigators tracking down who broke into Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account: Gabriel Ramuglia might be a good place to start.

The 25-year-old webmaster and entrepreneur is the operator of Ctunnel.com, the browsing proxy service used by the group that hacked into the vice presidential candidate's personal email account and exposed its contents to the world. While he has yet to examine his logs, he says there's a good chance they will lead to those responsible, thanks to some carelessness on their part.

"Usually, this sort of thing would be hard to track down because it's Yahoo email, and a lot of people use my service for that," he told El Reg in a phone interview. "Since they were dumb enough to post a full screenshot that showed most of the [Ctunnel.com] URL, I should be able to find that in my log."

To prevent abuse of the service - such as the occasional bomb threat or other illegal act that's been known to happen - Ramuglia logs each user's IP address, along with the time and web destination. That often isn't enough to track down people who access extremely popular websites. But in this case, the perpetrators included a whole string of random-looking characters when posting screenshots of Palin's hacked account. That will probably be enough for him to pinpoint the proverbial needle in the haystack.

I think the FBI has become very good at cracking cyber-crimes. They catch quite a few pedophiles and wanna-be terrorists by monitoring and tracking online activity. The Secret Service will also be on top of this, Lord only knows how many times they’ve had to track down threats to the President that some loser made online. I just hope that when the offender is caught, film crews are there so we can all watch the ‘perp walk’ and get a glimpse of this idiot. Anyway, Bill O’Reilly pledged that he was going to personally call the DOJ and see if this is being investigated. LOL, go Bill!! I guess we have to watch ‘The Factor’ tomorrow night to see what he found out.

Memo to law enforcement investigators tracking down who broke into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account: Gabriel Ramuglia might be a good place to start.

The 25-year-old webmaster and entrepreneur is the operator of Ctunnel.com, the browsing proxy service used by the group that hacked into the vice presidential candidate’s personal email account and exposed its contents to the world. While he has yet to examine his logs, he says there’s a good chance they will lead to those responsible, thanks to some carelessness on their part.

“Usually, this sort of thing would be hard to track down because it’s Yahoo email, and a lot of people use my service for that,” he told El Reg in a phone interview. “Since they were dumb enough to post a full screenshot that showed most of the [Ctunnel.com] URL, I should be able to find that in my log.”

Ramuglia got into the proxy business a few years ago, after schools began blocking access to an online game site he used to co-own. Pretty soon, people began using the proxy service to access YouTube, Gmail, MySpace, and dozens of other sites that are routinely blocked by IT departments.

To prevent abuse of the service - such as the occasional bomb threat or other illegal act that’s been known to happen - Ramuglia logs each user’s IP address, along with the time and web destination. That often isn’t enough to track down people who access extremely popular websites. But in this case, the perpetrators included a whole string of random-looking characters when posting screenshots of Palin’s hacked account. That will probably be enough for him to pinpoint the proverbial needle in the haystack.

The information at the moment is on a server at a Chicago colocation site owned by FDC Servers. Logs are automatically flushed after seven days, so the clock is ticking for law enforcement, who presumably are under intense pressure to protect the privacy of a candidate for the White House. Of course, there’s always the possibility that Ctunnel.com was only one of multiple anonymization services the email hackers used to cover their tracks, but there’s only one way to find out.

Ramuglia said if he is contacted by law enforcement officials he will probably give them the information they seek. At time of writing, he’s received no inquiries from any law enforcement agencies, he said.

The breach of Palin’s account “is pretty clearly against my terms of service,” he said. “As exciting as it is to be in the news, this is not the type of activity I can encourage by any means

Years ago in one of the popular newsgroups someone kept posting thousands of sporge posts ever day and so disrupted the group that is was nearly unusable. A group of hackers tracked down the sporger, who lived in Seattle, and posted his name, address,phone number and photo for millions of posters to see. I of course am not advocating anything of the sort for this scumbag(s)

25
posted on 09/17/2008 9:19:34 PM PDT
by Larry381
(A community in Chicago is missing an organizer and the housing he built)

I watched Gloria Allred (sp) on this and all she could say is.... She is using this to hide e-mails from the Gov because they can't subpoena these public domains. It was some pretty stupid stuff. She's already in spin mode.

By posting the URL, the time and date of the offense, the owner of that site can track down who was using the services of ctunnel to get to yahoo and other associated places at that time.

If he didn't do a few more steps to anonymize his internet prescence (like using it from school/work/home) he's DOOMED because the SS and the FBI have the manpower to track down every address as needed.

Please. We dont need anyone on FR creaming a poor guy who may not even be involved.

Didn't sound like he was creaming them at all. That one proxy admin will be a Godsend to the investigators. Better hurry up though. Proxy information and logs have a lifespan and a half life. The more time between the investigation and the review of the logs the harder it gets to get the information.

I'll bet that the Obama illegal meddling in the diplomatic process in Iraq is very likely to go unpursued, as well as his alledged false birth certificate, and I could go on for a while about events that are left unpursued by this current administration. BOR is very likely completely right that this will be unpursued.

44
posted on 09/17/2008 10:31:55 PM PDT
by matthew fuller
(Palin/McCain 08- So let it be written, So let it be done!)

The Bush administration has ignored so much that should have been prosecuted, that I have come to expect very little from it in terms of executing the laws of the USA. Whether or not I believe that a FBI/ Secret Service investigation is significant is really irrelevant; what matters is whether anyone gets prosecuted. I really hope that that happens, but I am not expecting much.

50
posted on 09/17/2008 11:03:12 PM PDT
by matthew fuller
(Palin/McCain 08- So let it be written, So let it be done!)

Disclaimer:
Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual
posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its
management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the
exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.